That marble tribute depicts a German shepherd, Chyba, that was brought to California after years of service in the German army and spent the last nine months of her life with Silveira’s family.

Silveira marks his 15th anniversary at the shelter today, and he said the thing that has kept him going this long is the variety of working in a smaller facility.

Rancho Coastal’s size “is a blessing and a curse, but in my case it’s a blessing because it means I still get to do the hands-on stuff, I still get to spend time with the animals,” he said. “Everyone’s doing a little bit of everything. You end up wearing a lot of hats here. That’s one of the things I like about it — I don’t do the same thing every day.”

Silveira’s love of German shepherds is in the numbers, certainly: More than 4,300 were rescued and placed with local families during the 14 years that he ran German Shepherd Rescue out of his home in Clairemont.

But it’s also evident in the ways that he has chosen to spend his free time over the years.

Take, for example, his stint as an “agitator” during dog training exercises — in Silveira’s words, “the idiot that puts on the big suit, that looks like the Michelin man and then has dogs turned on him.”

“I’m just a glutton for punishment,” he told me. “I always said that you never know a good German shepherd until it’s hanging off your arm, and I’d rather have padding in between my arm and its teeth.

“When I first did it, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m totally protected,’ ” he added. “That was until the second dog hit me and bit through the suit in my inner thigh. You start to learn how to have the dogs hit you, positioning yourself for a better hit.”

It’s one thing to get back on a horse; quite another to go on saving a breed of dog that can inflict that type of pain.

But Silveira lives for this. Peeking out from behind his desk on Friday were a pair of rescued dogs — Silveira’s dogs: one a golden retriever named Nala, and the other a German shepherd named Rex.